the hidden fortress (my name is mud)

There is no shortage of walls in Eastern Europe. For years I was mistaken, that the word Kremlin came from kreml which meant "wall". No, it means citadel instead. A fortress, that yes - has some damn solid walls. In my naive and messy understanding I was half right at best. Everything has a wall around it here. The golf club, the museum, the factory, the school, the playground. Even after death, gravestones stand surrounded by fences that lean into the dirt, jabbing each other sharing no common walls, standing independently around each aunt and uncle, mother and father.

This incessant building of walls seems so paranoid from the outside. A fort is a necessity, but the others seem so pointless. These great walls keep others out, and keep us inside. They contain and define. This is yours, and this is mine. We are like children sharing a bedroom with a length of yarn stretching across chairs and bookcases, with a warning not to cross it. You are not allowed on my side.

I have tried to think of walls as containers instead. What if the world is more liquid than we can deal with, and we need buckets to keep things straight. If you mix all of the colors together you just get mud. Ideas, for example - they need restraints. You cannot tell a story about everything. Some thoughts need to stay in, some need to go out and find a home in a different story. What if the acts, the structure of a story are like a series of tantalizing buckets? Some smaller, some bigger, some filled to brim, some shallow and dangerous. Line them all up, and see the story unfold in all of its glory. There  are secrets that can be hidden within these little walls, the page, the act, the chapter.